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Random Quote: One has to keep a particular openness of mind. Solving a problem is like going to a strange place, not to subdue it, but simply to spend time there, to preserve one's openness, to wait for the signals, to wait for the strangeness to dissolve into sense. -- Peter Whittle

Interests

My interests are in probability, functional analysis and statistics. At the moment, most of my research centers on numerical analysis, stochastic processes and simulation.

Books

If you are interested in analysis and probability with a view to mathematical economics then here is my reading list. I am extremely fussy, and I think that all of these books are great.

Introductory

Intermediate and Graduate texts

Markov Chains

Monographs, Other Topics

On-line Resources

The book by Bartle and Sherbert is where you should start. It is the best introduction to analysis that I know. Kolmogorov and Fomin is a nice read on functional analysis. Pollard has a great style and interesting topics. He uses a non-standard notation that takes a while to get your head around, but it's been kind of revolutionary for me in a way. Aliprantis and Burkinshaw is an excellent graduate text with lots of exercises. Dudley is great, but he frightens me a little bit. How can anyone be that smart? Schilling is both beautiful and useful. Cheney is a nice balance between theory and applications.

Meyn and Tweedie's book is available on-line. With apologies to any followers of the major monotheistic religions, I do believe that this is the single GREATEST BOOK in the history of the world. Sean Meyn is one of the top few researchers on stability of Markov chains. Sadly, Richard Tweedie recently passed away, but he made a huge contribution to Markov chain theory.

For background reading, try the wonderful book called "In Search of Infinity" by N. Ya. Vilenkin.

Other Bits and Pieces

I love the work of Escher, especially this one. Here's an interesting little equation about girls and evil.

The man generally recognized as the founder of modern functional analysis is Stefan Banach. He is very smart because he is POLISH. Many definitions and results in normed linear space stem from his 1922 thesis. Another important contributor to the theory of abstract spaces was Maurice Frechet. Frechet defined metric space for the first time in his thesis. He also helped generalize the Lebesgue integral to operate on functions of arbitrary domain.